dorm fridge for cooling

liquafaction

liquafaction

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Jul 1, 2003
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I bought a dorm fridge for cooling my tank, and have not had good results yet. What I did was this:

plumbed out of the sump in my tank, and into the top side of the refrigerator. I coiled up 10 feet of clear hose in the refrigerator, and plumbed out the bottom side. Then that plumbing goes into a canister filter, and the canister runs the water back into the tank. What it seems like it is doing is transfering so much heat in the refrigerator, that it will not cool off. I am going to try next a smaller hose to slow the water flow down. I have 5/8 i/d at the moment, and I am going down to 1/2 i/d. Have any of you guys had luck with a dorm fridge for cooling? any suggestions?
 
I am going to try next a smaller hose to slow the water flow down
Click to expand...

I am not sure what you mean here... If you use a smaller hose, the flow will increase... (i.e the speed at which the water runs will increase)....

I never tried it, because I read somewhere that they where not that efficient... I believe there is a website out there with DIY plans...

The coil in a chiller is usually a metal coil so that it can transfer heat better. Metal tubing should work better than standard aquarium tubing.

Perhaps you also have to take BTUs into consideration.

One thing you could try is switching the flow to the refrigerator on and then off. That way you give the water some chance to give off its heat before moving to the tank... I would use the smallest diameter tubing and coil it really neat inside the fridge. The reason you want a small diameter is to increase the area for heat exchange.... Since you are stopping the flow, the fridge will get a better chance to cool all the water down.

That is my 2c
 
I have never tried this myself, but what I've read that works is-

put a bucket of water in the fridge, then run small diameter hose with as many feet as you can possibly fit (wrap around some scrap eggcrate glued in a cross or x shape-remember the more surface area touching the water, the greater the potential heat transfer)-the water acts better as a heat sink than the air in the fridge, but too large a hose and the amount of aquarium water affected is negligible-it passes through without contacting any cooling surface, ergo no-go.

hope this helps out some, and keep us posted if it appears worthwhile- I too have considered trying this, but have yet to run across a fridge without buying one brand new-yardsale is probably my best bet, or classifieds in the paper.

Mark
 
the smallest diameter I have at the moment is 1/2" I am afraid of going to much smaller than that, because I want to be able to feed enough water to my filter.
 
Thanks for the link, I would have to agree with not trying this with anything larger than 30 gallons. I have tried a few more tricks, and I am going to try one more. I will let you guys know what I find. The coolest I have been able to go is about a 1 degree drop in temp.
 
The problem with refridgerator based chillers is how the compressor is set up to work. Simply put, fridge compressors really dont move much heat very quickly. They are designed to maintain low temperatures by taking small amounts of heat from small masses that store very little heat (i.e. very low btu yields). Chillers, on the other hand, are made for a small temperature drop but can pull heat much more quickly. (Okay, so maybe thats not so simple) Basically, its a trade off: make something very cold with a minimum of ongoing heat input (since a fridge is insulated) or make something a little cool against a lot of heat input. It sounds the same, intuitively, but from the standpoint of a compressor it really isnt. Air Conditioner compressors work much more like an actual chiller, and thus are a better choice for DIY chillers. Of course, a dorm fridge setup will likely work some on a very small tank, but it certainly isnt efficient and wouldnt keep up with the heat input of, say, metal halides.
 
Here is an update:

DORM FRIDGES DO NOT WORK.

I have tried many different ways to make it work, and not a one does for a big tank. I think it would work for a smaller tank though. I have preached that this would work, because I have a couple of friends that say they use them, and they say they work. Guess whatI found out? One friend uses a dorm refer on a small tank, and the other friend used (past tense) a full size refer. I appologize for saying this works. I was putting trust in hearsay.

I was thinking of anther Idea for a chiller, and also found info on someone trying this. I am going to spend money on a chiller though, and not go through the trouble. Use a window A/C. for the same reason above. A/C s move more BTU's. This sounds like a lot of trouble, and I do not want to go through with it. If someone decides to, let me know how it works
 
I know this post is 5 months old but I’ve read it 2 times and I do not like what it has in it.

A dorm size fridge is fine to cool a good size tank. If you would use something to hold some of the cold in like a 5 to 10 2 liter soda bottles. You could wrap the hose around the bottles to exchange the water temp. Once all the water that holds the cold gets cold your fridge would cycle on a regular basis and be fine.

I have never done this on a fish tank but I did do this on a set of 10 water cooled computers. I had my soda, water bottles and some other thing good to have when your going to be at a computer for about 30 hours plus. If it could cool 10 pressers down to 50*, hard drives down to 60* and keeping everything else in the case around 70* in a hot apartment in the summer when it was in the 80’s and 90’s in the room I know it would cool a 55 to 75 gallon tank.

The more I read about when people try this is it will cool for a few minutes the not cool for a while. Well that’s just the cycle of the fridge working. You need to put a large amount of something that will absorb the cold and let it back out when needed. The only bad thing about using a setup like this would be controlling the flow of water compared to the temp of the tank. How to turn the flow on and off? If it’s off for a while then the water that’s in the fridge than it will be very cold, how would that affect the water in the tank? What about the shock that would cause.

If some real want to do this I will talk to them on the phone and share the problems and how I overcome them with my computer system. I don’t need to cool my tanks now because there all in my basement where I spend a lot of my time.
 
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